> Laws are only as strong as the enforcement.

This is one of the fundamental issues that underlies our broken system in the US. The gaps between what the law actually is, what people think it is, what people want it to be, and what it in practice is, are enormous.

Some of the recent deportation cases highlight this. You have cases where people were living in the US illegally for decades but faced no repercussions, and now people are upset because they were suddenly detained and/or deported. Virtually all the framing I see is about how it's a sudden and horrible injustice that they were detained during a "routine" ICE check-in --- very little about how we have accumulated this palimpsest of rules and enforcement policies resting on laws which don't actually encode the state of affairs most people want.

If we want people to be able to immigrate easily and safely (and I do), we need to stop breathing sighs of relief when a new president comes in and issues some kind of temporary executive order that makes things okay in the short term. We need to fix the laws at all levels, including criminalizing enforcement actions that are contrary to the law. That would likely mean massive purges of many individuals in local and state governments and law enforcement agencies, with many of them sentenced to considerable prison terms for the kind of enforcement discretion that we currently accept as normal. It's not going to be pretty. But it has to be done if we want to return to a system grounded in the actual rule of law and not the rule of law enforcement.